


It's Always the Quiet Ones

by DustySoul



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Karen as daredevil, Karen centric, Karen's dark and mysterious past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-10 22:44:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4410722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DustySoul/pseuds/DustySoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Karen is daredevil and Matt is just a blind lawyer with sensory processing disorder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for this prompt on the kinkmeme  
> http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/3230.html?thread=6643870#cmt6643870

She wonders if she came to Hell’s Kitchen to run away from her old life or to start a new one.

It seems like she’s just gotten herself into the same mess. Except this time it’s so much worse.

She repositions the heating pad from where it was trying to slide off her abdomen. It’s twenty minutes on the fading bruising purpling around her belly button, then twenty minutes to where she’s fighting one of the worst battles against cramps she’s ever faced. She sighs, and shuffles about her bed trying to find the least painful position because it feels like _everything_ hurts. Even her bones hurt.

And that question comes back. Because if she came here to run away from her old life she’s going to drop the thumb drive with that spreadsheet into the harbor and forget it ever happened. And if she’s not…

The pain finally fades. The medicine is probably kicking in, making her drowsy.

And if she’s not…

_She’s not._

She gives the bruises time to fade. She needs to be at her best to face the storm that’s brewing…

 

 

Life is a nightmare. A sick, sick nightmare.

She can’t wake from it. She can’t sleep to avoid it - closing her eyes just shows her a corpse, blood shining in the early morning light.

Stopping rapists at frat parties and exchanging blows with what ever would be criminal she stumbled across is one thing…

She… She should have never thought she could actually _do_ anything. _Change_ anything…

She wants to cry. For the first time that day, she does it for herself, not for Danny. Or Danny’s wife. Just for her. Because this is her life. She should have known it would happen. She should have known she couldn’t handle it. That finally, she’d be the one behind bars.

_She was five years old when her mother signed her up for karate. She was ten when she first had to use it, but it was shouting ‘Stranger Danger!’ at the top of her lungs which saved her that day._

And, at night, drifting off to sleep alone in her cell, it’s the training and the years of dirty fighting and yes, yes, of course, the _screaming_ that save her once more. The after math of nearly being murdered in her sleep reminds her that feeling sorry for herself doesn’t do shit. There’s not much else she can do. Not until they charge her. Not until she has two nobody lawyers helping her in court. So she sits, on guard, ignoring the other inmates watching her.

She can tell they are wonder what she’s in for, or if the news has spread, what the full story is. And she can feel their unease, practically hear them thinking _Am I next?_  

There are no sheets in prisons. It’s a dead give away… And it’s terrifying, of course, that they’d be so obvious.

And all any of them can do is sit quietly for in their cells and wait.

 

 

She’s silent during the taxi ride to these lawyer’s newly acquired office. She’s pressed hip to knee against Matt. Neither of them seem the lest bit perturbed. 

_No one gets this many second chances_. The thought practically strangles her as securely as a sheet wrapped around her neck . She doesn’t know yet which is better: being trapped in this car or in a cell. From the moment she woke up next to a dead body she didn’t have a plan and one hasn’t magically appeared to her in the interim. _Don’t get killed_. Is all she can think. _Don’t get killed._

“You’re allowed to relax, Miss Page.” The blind one, Matt, states.

She clears her throat.

The other one, Foggy, says, “Don’t think it’s going to work, buddy. Nice thought, though.”

She lets out a very purposeful breath, feeling herself slowly deflate.

It’s only going to take another ten minutes for her to feel like a string about to snap… She’s already wondering who the hell these strangers are, circling back to that original conundrum of _better off here or where I was?_

 

 

She’s scared and she rambles. They give her a recorder to ramble into.

She decides, in a flash, that she was safer in her cell. And then almost as quickly the conviction fades away. A larger, consuming fear arises. It kills her to the bone. Maybe these lawyers really don’t have anything to do with it. And the scary thing, in that sentence, is thinking how big the _it_ must be.

She doesn’t know, not for sure, and she doesn’t have a plan. 

Matt and Foggy talk about keeping her safe. And she’s still stumbling through these hours blind… uh… with the rug pulled out from under her. But she remembers this is her top form. And she thinks she can take Matt. Maybe he’s some… some hit man. Some blind hit man. Ha!

She takes a steadying breath. She lets herself be calmed, focuses on the rain soaking her shirt, pitter pattering on the pavement. “Is it going to be okay?” She asks allowed, starting to wonder why they didn’t take a taxi. (Maybe because Matt would have no way of knowing where it dropped him off in relation to his building?)

“Yes, Miss Page, I do think so.”

And for some reason she trusts him. She waits to for that to fade as well.

It never does.

 

 

So in the morning she tells Matt about what she did. (That she went back to her apartment. That there was someone waiting there for her to reveal where she hid the thumb drive. That she got away. _Not_ that she had to bash his skull in or that she got stuck with the knife. And, most importantly, she tells him she has no idea what to do next.)

Matt gives her a long look and she wonders what his eyes look like behind those tinted lenses. The rest of his face looks no different from all the other times she’s seen him, except that his mouth is a thin line. Still… it’s _a look_. He works his jaw before finally saying, “That was very dangerous.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“You shouldn’t have to.”

“I know."

"Are you hurt?”

“No… not badly, at least.” Karen doesn’t like lying to him.

He rubs his temples, takes a few steps back like he’s about to pace and then says, “We go public.”

“What?”

“We go public with the information you have. Get it posted in the news papers.”

“We… yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

They go public.

And Karen go back home again.

 

 

Two days. Ha!

Two days. 

_Two days._ Her eyes burn and her throat seizes. 

Two days and her world’s been turned on its head. It’s like… It’s like waking up one day and finding out that aliens are real.

She dissolves into hysterics, laughing and crying at once. She tries to cover her mouth, her mission blurring.

It’s like… It’s like waking up and finding aliens attacking your city, your home, the bodega down the street…

It’s like the day she woke up from her coma and realized she was listening to two sets of heart beats. Hers. And her mother's.

Except this time life moves so much faster than that.

With what she does being friends with _lawyers_ is a terribly bad idea. And now here she is. Working for them.

Here she is working to tear down a crime lord. A king. A spider who’s web she can’t even start to fathom.


	2. Chapter 2

Foggy and Matt take turns talking to her.

Foggy gets roaring drunk with her in some shitty dive bar she knows she hasn’t seen the last off. He just lets his good natured optimism poor out of him and she can’t help but laugh as they stumble and clutch at each other in turns. It’s almost good. It almost makes her feel real again.

Matt takes a different approach. They sit in her part of the office and she’d turned the lights out. Matt’s face is illuminated by the street lights out side. If he could see she’d be a shadow barely disturbing the night.

“It’s not fair.” She says, sour.

“No. It’s not.” Matt agrees, amicably.

“Doesn’t it ever make you angry?”

Matt turns away, chews at the bottom of his lip. He turns back to her, not that he can look her in the eye or anything and says, “Yes. It does.”

And now it's Karen's turn to bite her lip - to look away. (Not like he can see her...) Words well up inside her and she doesn’t have any alcohol to blame it on. Maybe that’s just as well. “I hear them.”

“Hear what?”

She laughs at herself because god, god, that sounded crazy. And it kind of is. “Just… people hurting. It’s really bad, a night, there’s nothing to distract me.” 

Her throat tightens and has to swallow past it, breath suddenly shallow. “That sounds… that sounds mad. God. I’m- I’m- I shouldn’t have said anything. Just-” 

She pushes back from the table suddenly. “I- I should go.” She rummages for her things.

“I can hear them too.”

She drops her purse. “What?”

“The people, hurting. Not just on the streets…” He sighs, “All over. I hear them.”

Karen stares at him before weakly whispering, “How?” She sinks back into her chair, leaving her purse where it had fallen.

Matt shrugs. “I was diagnosed with sensory processing disorder when I was a kid. It means my ears hear to well for my brain.” He smiles. “Not as obvious as being blind. I take it you didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Get diagnosed with SPD.”

Karen doesn’t shake her head. She sits there staring at Matt as the words settle in her mind. “Uh, no.”

“You shook your head, didn’t you.” His smile wides for just a second before falling off his face again.

She huffs a breath of a laugh, “No, actually. I was… just processing that.”

Matt makes an interested huff, resettles in his chair. “So what happened to you then, if you can hear them?”

“I um…”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I mean… it’s fine. I…” She clears her throat. “I got meningitis when I was sixteen. I was one of the people the vaccine didn’t protect. And um… I went into a coma. I was out for a week and a half, they told me. When I woke up, everything was just so _loud_. At first I just thought… you know it was waking up from being so sick. But then it didn’t go away…”

She refocuses on Matt, who has his hands steepled by his face. He drops them, than takes in a deep breath. “I don’t know what to say.” He admits.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Of course I do. Thank you for telling me.”

“It’s not like… it’s a secret.” She has secrets, knows perfectly fine what they are. “It’s just… not something most people want to hear about. Doesn’t make good dinner conversation.”

“No. Not like that amazing casserole.”

“No. Not like the casserole.” She lets out a ghost of a laugh and turns back to look out the window.

They sit in silence for a time.

And some how it brings Karen to the edge of tears, voice shaking when she says, “I can’t stand it.”There’s a man harassing a woman, following her down the block. And she’d be out there to scare him off except there’s a fucking _knife wound_ still healing on her side.

Matt reaches out, slow and searching. “I know.”

Karen offers him her hand. He squeezes.

“Honestly,” he says, “the fact that I can’t do anything to prevent it… it makes me feel…” He takes in a deep breath, let’s it out. “Helpless.”

Karen nods, then says, “Yeah.” still staring out the windows.

Because sure she can go out and be the big damn hero, but she can’t do it twenty four seven. She can’t save everyone. She can’t be out there now.

"For what it's worth." She says, "You are making a huge difference."

"As are you."

She smiles.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to message or follow me on tumblr at dusty-soul.tumblr.com


End file.
